choi lacan'sgraphofdesire 12

Original Article

Lacan’s double battlefront in the1957–58 seminar: Constructing thegraph of desire

Won ChoiDepartment of Philosophy, Loyola University Chicago, USA.E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract The primary aim of this article is to clarify Lacan’s understanding of thegraph of desire through a close reading of Seminar V, in which a double debate withKlein and Marx is engaged. With this clarification, I contest Zizek’s view that identifiesthe lower level of the graph with the symbolic, and the upper level with the symbolicshot through by the real. According to him, while at the lower level the “alienation”of the subject in the symbolic transpires, at the upper level the “separation” of thesubject from the symbolic itself becomes conceivable as the dimension of the real isintroduced. Against this construal, I identify the lower level with the imaginary, and theupper level with the symbolic. Zizek’s misapprehension results from neglecting thedistinction Lacan makes between the symbolic that arrives in advance in the imaginaryphase itself and the symbolic proper. In the concluding section, I attempt to drawout some of the main implications that this clarification has for the Lacanian critiqueof ideology.Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2012) 17, 244–261. doi:10.1057/pcs.2011.4;published online 22 September 2011

Keywords: graph of desire; Klein; Lacan; Marx; symbolic; Zizek

Slavoj Zizek (1989, p. 124) interprets the debate between Louis Althusser

and Jacques Lacan by referring principally to the difference between the two

levels installed in the Lacanian graph of desire. He identifies the lower level

with the symbolic and the upper one with the symbolic shot through by the

real. His claim is that, whereas Althusser limits himself to the lower level in

which the “alienation” of the subject in the symbolic transpires, Lacan adds

yet another level in which the dimension of the real (jouissance) is

introduced, and thus the “separation” of the subject from the symbolic

itself becomes conceivable. Althusser appears, then, to be an obstinate

r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society Vol. 17, 3, 244–261www.palgrave-journals.com/pcs/

structuralist who reduces the subject to a mere effect of the symbolic, whereas

Lacan appears to be a radical critic of such a position.

I contest this view (without going into a discussion of Althusser’s theory of

ideology) by arguing that it is much more appropriate to identify the lower level

with the imaginary and the upper one with the symbolic. Zizek’s misapprehen-

sion results from neglecting the crucial distinction Lacan makes between the

symbolic that arrives in advance in the imaginary phase itself and the symbolic

proper (the pure symbolic dissociated at the upper level from the imaginary).

The real intervenes in the form of anxiety as a catalyst to make the transition

possible from the imaginary to the symbolic. In this perspective, it is, rather,

Lacan who appears to insist on the necessity of the symbolic. Zizek alters

Lacan’s critique of Marxism by misrepresenting his intention behind the

construction of the graph, which is to emphasize the supreme importance of the

symbolic – not of the real.

The primary aim of this article, therefore, is to clarify Lacan’s understanding

of the graph of desire. I attempt to achieve this goal through a close reading of

Le seminaire V: Les formations de l’inconscient, inasmuch as this is not only the

seminar in which his graph of desire is developed for the first time, but also one

of the two major seminars in which Karl Marx’s formula of commodity is

discussed at length (the other being Seminar XVI).1 In the concluding section,

however, I also try to draw out some of the main implications that this

clarification has for the Lacanian critique of ideology.

In Seminar V, Lacan makes his interventions on two different battlegrounds:

with Marxism and with Melanie Klein (or the Kleinian school). The respective

weights given to the two battlefronts are not symmetrical, however. Much more

important is the debate with Klein. The debate with Marxism appears to be

secondary; it can be better understood when viewed against the background of

the other debate.

The Debate with Klein

In the 1950s, Lacan found himself on a bloody battlefield where two or more

radically opposed branches of mainstream psychoanalysis were constantly in

combat. This quarrel was largely a result of what is known as the “controversial

discussions,” which broke out between Anna Freud’s school and Klein’s in 1941

and lasted as long as five years. The controversial discussions began when Anna

Freud, trying to escape with her father from Vienna (then under the rule of

Nazi Germany), moved to London, where her rival theorist, Melanie Klein, was

active as a theoretical leader and a strong influence over many British

psychoanalysts. The final outcome of the longstanding, heated debates was

far from satisfying to either group; the British Psychoanalytical Society could do

Lacan’s double battlefront in the 1957–58 seminar

245r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society Vol. 17, 3, 244–261

nothing more than officially admit the presence of the conflict (Evans, 1997,

pp. 123–124).

The arguments were about the training of analysts (Roudinesco, 1997,

p. 193). Anna Freud’s position was that a psychoanalyst should view the

patient’s initial negative or aggressive reaction toward her not as a transference

but as a defense of the ego that she must disarm first in order eventually to bring

about a genuinely positive transferential situation. In such a situation, the

patient may successfully identify himself with her and thus gain a stronger

control over his own id. Inasmuch as, in this approach, strengthening the

patient’s ego constitutes an indispensable preliminary step toward any possible

analytic work, Anna Freud is considered the originator of the school known as

ego psychology. Klein, on the other hand, considered transference strictly as the

object of analysis, an object to be analyzed rather than used for an educational

purpose. Therefore, the patient’s negative, as well as positive, reactions are not

to be dismissed as an unnecessary aggression but should be interpreted as a

transferential phenomenon.

This radical difference concerning the question of transference goes back to a

much earlier debate, in the late 1920s, in which the burgeoning psychoanalysis

of children was at issue. The positions that the two theorists took were pretty

much the same except that their stances were more visibly related to their

different understandings of the superego, especially the time of its formation. It

is well known that Klein’s innovation consists in the discovery of the then-new

technique called “play technique.” Play technique enables access to children’s

unconscious through the use of various toys that can serve as symbols. Because

very young children lack proper language skills, an analyst cannot treat them

using the traditional technique of free association. Klein, by proposing to

analyze the “symbolism” of children’s interactions with toys, effectively

pioneered into a virgin territory from which psychoanalysis had long been

kept out.

This technique also implies that children’s psyches develop early, between one

and three years, such that psychoanalytic interpretations for adults are more or

less similarly applicable to children. Children’s reactions to certain types of toy-

playing can become psychoanalytically meaningful and thus interpreted as

“transferences” only when there is assumed to be an early formation of the

superego in their psyches. This is why Klein (1927) wrote, “It is certain that the

ego of children is not comparable to that of adults. The superego, on the other

hand, approximates closely to that of the adult and is not radically influenced

by later development as is the ego” (p. 154).

Anna Freud (1927) refuted this position and insisted on her father’s idea,

drawn from an interpretation of the second topography, that the superego is

formed only as a result of the dissolution of the Oedipus complex, a dissolution

that is normally achieved around three to five years of age. She considered the

superego, in the proper sense, to be radically absent from the psyche of children

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246 r 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society Vol. 17, 3, 244–261

younger than three. She maintained that what Klein mistakenly viewed as the

early superego was only an expression of the unstable and temporary relation

that children form with external objects, such as parents (original objects) or

psychoanalysts (new objects). This is also why she thought that an analyst could

easily alter children’s premature psyche by simply manipulating external settings

and assisting the children to adapt better to those settings. The analyst’s job

is to put himself in the place of children’s superego and educate the children

from there.

Klein (1928), in response, proposed to shift the Oedipus complex as well to a

much earlier period. She claimed that the “sense of guilt associated with

pregenital fixation” that children experience as early as at the end of the first

year was the direct effect of the “introjection of the Oedipus love-objects”

(p. 70). She criticized Anna Freud’s method by pointing out that it not only

obscured the real cause of children’s neurosis by giving up the work of analysis

that was due, but it also set parents in opposition to analysts, practically

condemning the former as external objects that were simply not good enough

(see Holder, 2005).

Lacan’s intervention in this debate was carried out by means of the symbolic

that arrives in advance, or what he called in Seminar V, “the primordial

symbolization between the child and the mother” (Lacan, 1957–58, p. 180). It

was this idea that allowed him to side with Klein rather than with Anna Freud,

while at the same time he critically explored exactly where the major difficulty

of Klein’s theory lay.

The idea of primordial symbolization, in other words, was Lacan’s double-

edged sword: it rejected Anna Freud’s position by approving Klein’s ideas about

the early superego and the early stages of the Oedipus complex, while proposing

to reformulate them from the standpoint of the symbolic, which for him was

strictly related to language and not just to “symbols” or symbol-equivalents,

such as toys, that still remained at the level of the imaginary. The major problem

he identified in Klein’s theory was that, by focusing too much on the dual

relation between the child and the mother and trying to explain everything

through a mechanism of imaginary projection, it did not really take into account

the symbolic dimension. After expressing his agreement with Klein on the early

arrival of the Oedipus complex, Lacan (1957–58) decisively diverged from her

by claiming that her theory was still confined to the imaginary plane:

[B]y formulating it simply in terms of the confrontation of the child with

the maternal personage, she [Klein] ends up in a speculative relation in

mirror. From this fact, it follows that the maternal body y becomes the

enclosure and the dwelling place of what can be localized, by projection,

of the child’s drives. y In the last resort, nothing in this dialectic makes us

depart from a mechanism of illusory projection. y In order to complete

the Kleinian dialectic, it is necessary to introduce this notion: that the



exterior for the subject is above all given, not as something projected from

the interior of the subject, from its drives, but as the place where the

desire of the Other is situated, and where the subject has to encounter it.

(pp. 271–272; italics added)

There, the Other, whose desire the subject must encounter, Lacan argued, is not

an imaginary other, but the symbolic Other whose place is for the time being

occupied by the mother qua “a speaking being” (p. 393). Lacan’s claim was

that, without this dimension of the desire of the Other, one would not be able to

explain how it becomes possible for the subject to escape eventually from the

vicious circle in which the drives are projected into maternal part-objects and

then are cannibalistically reincorporated in the form of bad objects, which are

yet again required to be projected to the outside, and so on; it would seem to be

a miracle for a child to come out of this Kleinian hell as “normal.”

To illustrate how the eventual departure from the Kleinian vicious circle is

possible, Lacan distinguished two different levels at which the child’s demand

to the mother operates: the level of need and that of desire. The child’s – or

rather the infant’s – demand, at first, naturally starts out as a simple one for a

satisfaction of a biological need (the need to be fed or the need to be at a

comfortable temperature). The infant cries out when he has a demand; the

mother takes up this demand and does something in response. If he is satisfied,

the infant will stop crying and go back to his original state of calmness. If not,

however, the infant will continue to cry until his demand is satisfied or until he

is simply too exhausted. We can see that this cry of the infant already operates

as a sort of signifier that should be interpreted by the mother. Insofar as it

operates as a signifier, we also see that a gap opens up between the subject’s

demand and the mOther’s response.

What Klein called “bad objects” result from the frustrations that the infant

may experience with respect to his needs; the infant is frustrated because, for

example, some breasts do not produce enough milk. And yet Klein further

discovered that, over the course of development, the infant’s demands tend to

grow more and more insatiable. Even when he is fed enough, the infant will not

stop crying. This unappeasable hunger leads the infant to enter what Klein

called (after her mentor, Karl Abraham) the second phase of the oral period, in

which the child starts to attack the mother by sadistically biting her nipple. It is

essential, however, to notice that, in Klein’s theory, frustration is thought of in

terms of needs or, at most, of innate drives that the infant is born with.

By contrast, Lacan suggested that such a frustration be theorized at the level

of the signifier. The infant is frustrated not because there are things like bad

breasts that do not keep up with his demand (whether the fault should fall on

the side of the poor breasts or on the side of the greedy infant), but because there

is an abysmal gap that separates the demand as a signifier and the mOther’s

interpretation of it. In principle, this gap cannot be closed because it is not

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simply caused by a temporary miscommunication for which the infant’s future

acquisition of proper language skills would be a sufficient solution. What

constitutes the fundamental deadlock for the infant is the dimension of the

desire of the Other. It is because the mOther desires qua subject, and because

the infant desires the very desire of the mOther, which mutates frequently, that

the infant is bound to feel frustrated.

Over the initial horizon of the demand as need thus emerges its beyond,

namely, the horizon of the demand as desire. It is this excess that will eventually

come into full play when the child begins to engage in what is known as the

Fort-Da game, in which the presence and the absence of the mOther are

“primordially” symbolized. The child obsessively asks, Why is mother away

(for example, talking on the phone with somebody else), when she should be

here with me, feeding me, playing with me? Why does she desire something

other than me? What on earth can this object of her desire be that I myself

should become? In short, what is the meaning of all this, of all this signifying

chain, in which her presence and absence alternate in an arbitrary way? As we

shall see later, this phase is the first of “the three times of the Oedipus complex”

(Lacan, 1957–58, p. 179): frustration. The symbolic that arrives in advance

functions here beneath the surface of the apparently imaginary dual relation

between the child and the mother.

From Metonymy to Metaphor

To distinguish this “first symbolization” from later symbolization, Lacan

borrowed terminologies from Roman Jakobson and introduced two fundamen-

tally distinct modes in which language operates: metonymy and metaphor.

Metonymy corresponds to what Sigmund Freud called “displacement,” whereas

metaphor corresponds to “condensation.” Lacan preferred to characterize them

as “combination” and “substitution.” Metonymy designates the diachronic

combinatory axis of the signifying chain. If I hear somebody say, “I am hungry,”

I immediately start to link the signifiers “I,” “am,” and “hungry” and try to

understand the meaning of the whole sentence. But this can be done only in a

retroactive manner. It is only when I come to the final period that I can work on

the entire sentence backward and carve up the signified of each signifier. Lacan

gave us a formula to express this metonymical dimension of language:

f ðS . . . S0ÞS � SðFÞs:

Here, the “f ( ) S” on the left side of the equation denotes the function of

signification, while the “S y S0” indicates that all the signifiers in the chain

from S to S0 are combined in such a way as to produce the effect of signification,

which is represented by the “S (—) s” on the right side. The S and the s,

respectively standing for the signifier and the signified, are separated by the bar



placed in between. This bar is the same bar we can find in the Saussurean

formula of the sign, “s/S,” although the Lacanian formula instead turns it upside

down and becomes “S/s,” thereby emphasizing the primacy of the signifier over

the signified (Lacan, 1966, pp. 428–429). It is important to note here, however,

that the metonymy of the signifiers does produce a signified, a meaning.

It is, then, not entirely correct to say that metonymy lacks any kind of quilting

point (point de capiton) and thus produces no meaning at all. A period at the

end of a sentence, for instance, is what works as a horizontal or diachronic

quilting point by means of which the meaning of the signifying chain is fixed.

The problem, of course, is that, even if the chain of the signifiers is quilted to a

signified, there nevertheless lingers a possibility that this quilting point itself

may be undone when another chain of signifiers eventually arrives. Let us

assume that the sentence “I am hungry” is followed by another phrase, “hungry

for knowledge!” This phrase considerably alters the meaning of the original

sentence and forces it to imply, “I want to learn,” instead of “I want to eat.”

Hence, the horizontal quilting point is not as stable as it might seem at first. This

is why Lacan (1957–58) defined the sense generated by metonymy as peu-

de-sens (p. 97). A metonymical combination of signifiers, at most, makes “little-

sense,” if not nonsense.

I would like to return for a moment to the aforementioned primordial

symbolization between child and mother. The child is frustrated because he cannot

grasp the desire of the mOther in a conclusive manner. Of course, for a while, he is

preoccupied by the alluring idea that he might just be able to do so, for example,

by throwing up milk and thus causing the mother to turn around, hang up the

phone, and run to him to take care of the mess he just created. The child thinks,

“Ah! Once again, I am the true meaning of her desire”; nevertheless, he is relieved

only to be frustrated again when she goes away next time to do something else,

such as chatting with the father, reading a book, cleaning the house, and so forth.

In this way, the child is alienated by the unending metonymical sliding of the desire

of the mOther. Owing to the whim of the Other, all his attempts to make sense

of the situation ultimately fail, generating only “little sense,” which works merely

as a lure for his interminable chase. The child, therefore, is not yet a subject,

insofar as this term is supposed to carry within it a certain sense of autonomy; he is

only an “a-subject” (assujet) radically deprived of the power to master his own

situation, namely, his relation with the mother:

In this measure, the child who constituted his mother as subject, on the basis

of the first symbolization, finds himself entirely submitted to what we can

call, but only by way of anticipation, “the law.” y The law of the mother is,

of course, the fact that the mother is a speaking being and this suffices to

legitimate my saying the law of the mother. Nevertheless, this law is, if I may

say so, an uncontrolled law. y [T]his law is entirely in the subject who

supports it, namely in the good or bad will of the mother, the good or bad

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mother. y The subject outlines himself as a-subject; he is an a-subject

because he first experiences and senses himself as profoundly subjected

[assujetti] to the caprice of the one he depends on, even if this caprice is an

articulated caprice. (Lacan, 1957–58, pp. 188–189; italics added)

Recall that Lacan’s account in this passage also corresponds to the first level of

the graph of desire. Thus we see him introduce the graph (Figure 1) which looks

exactly like the first graph, called the “elementary cell”. This graph should be

read in this way: insofar as the mOther qua the signifying chain (a speaking

being) is also the subject qua a desiring being (Le sujet), the law of the mother

(La loi) is an arbitrary law that makes out of the child only the a-subject

(L’assujet) profoundly alienated in language. Therefore, we see that the

frustration of the subject by the arbitrary maternal law, as it has already

started at the lower level of the graph, will culminate in the subject’s outcry,

“Che vuoi?” (What do you want?), which is described in the third graph of

desire, which initiates the construction of the upper level.

This frustration of the subject can possibly be overcome only when another

essential dimension of language, namely, metaphor, intervenes. In contrast to

metonymy, metaphor characterizes the synchronic substitutive axis of the signi-

fying chain in which one signifier is replaced by another. This is a fundamental

operation that produces the effect of vertical or synchronic quilting point by

means of which the indefinite metonymical sliding of the signifying chain is finally

stabilized. Lacan’s formula for metaphor reads:

f ðS0/SÞS � SðþÞs:

The signifying function of the signifier S being substituted for by another

signifier S0 is equivalent to what the “S (þ ) s” on the right side of the equation

indicates, namely, that the signifier S sinks under the bar to the nether region of

the signified, producing a new signified s. The þ sign placed between S and s

Figure 1: Subjection.

Source: Lacan, 1957–58, p. 189, reproduced by permission.



does not stand for “plus” but for the “crossing of the bar,” a “poetic or creative

crossing” through which the subject, in its proper sense, at last comes about:

“This crossing expresses the condition for the passage of the signifier into the

signified, whose moment I pointed out above by provisionally conflating it with

the place of the subject” (Lacan, 1966, p. 429; italics added).

This is the same crossing as the one called “the crossing of the fundamental

fantasy by the subject.” The subject, through the formation of a metaphor,

crosses the fantasy precisely by forcing the master signifier itself to cross the bar

into the nether region of the signified. This crossing, however, does not really

mark the moment of the subject’s going beyond the symbolic, as is viewed

by many Lacanian scholars, especially Zizek. Rather, it marks the moment of

the subject’s entrance into the symbolic order proper, because, while metonymy

belongs to the order of the mother, metaphor fundamentally belongs to the

order of the father. The name-of-the-father is the paternal metaphor that inter-

venes as the “pure symbolic principle” (Lacan, 1957–58, p. 227) by substituting

itself for the desire of the mOther, which is the master signifier.

It should be emphasized that this metaphorical effect is produced not as the

signified is substituted for by the signifier, but as one signifier is substituted for

by another. This is why, in contrast to the peu-de-sens of metonymy, Lacan

linked the metaphorical generation of sense to the pas-de-sens. The pas-de-sens

does not really mean “nonsense” (p. 98); it does produce sense or meaning.

“Metaphor is a quite general function,” Lacan argued, “I would even say that it

is by the possibility of substitution that the generation, if one may say so, of the

world of sense is conceived” (p. 31). Rather, the pas-de-sens of metaphor

consists in the fact that such a world of sense is engendered through a

substitutive operation that occurs at the level of phonemes. Lacan took the

example of the word atterre. Although this term means “terrified” in French,

nevertheless it originally has nothing to do with the signified “terrified.” The

verb atterrir from which the adjective atterre is derived means only “to land, to

arrive at the land from the sea.” It is through the operation of the homonymic

phoneme ter of this verb, which is shared by another term terreur (terror), that

the term atterre gains the new signified “terrified,” condensing the two terms

with completely different meanings and origins.

Jokes and witticisms are also formed through this kind of condensational

mechanism of metaphor. This is why in Seminar V Lacan set his whole

discussion of metonymy and metaphor around the question of jokes, specifically

referring to Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

One of the central examples that Freud (1905) used to illustrate the mechanism of

jokes is from Heinrich Heine’s Reisebilder III. The joke is about a lottery agent,

Hirsch-Hyacinth, who boasts of his relations with the wealthy Baron Rothschild,

and says, “I sat beside Salomon Rothschild and he treated me quite as his equal –

quite famillionairely.” As Freud explained, the neologism “famillionairely”

succinctly expresses a long and complicated meaning: “Rothschild treated me

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quite as his equal, quite familiarly – that is, so far as a millionaire can. y A rich

man’s condescension y always involves something not quite pleasant for

whoever experiences it” (p. 17). The rapid connection between Familiar and

Milionar is achieved through the shared phonemes “mili” and “ar.” Freud

described this connection as a “condensation accompanied by the formation of

a substitute” (p. 19).

Yet Freud (p. 140) further excavated another meaning attached to the term

“famillionairely,” which addresses the issue of Heine’s personal history. In this

perspective, Hirsch-Hyacinth appears as a metonymical displacement of the

name of Heinrich Heine himself. And behind the millionaire Salomon

Rothschild there hides another millionaire, namely, Heine’s own uncle Salomon

Heine, whose daughter Heine had a “burning wish” to marry but could not,

because, like Baron Rothschild, Heine’s uncle always treated him “a little

famillionairely.” This is why Heine takes “the greatest satisfaction” in making

this joke. In other words, the jouissance that Heine successfully binds in the joke

arises from the expulsion, to the nether region of the signified, of the signifier,

the name “Salomon Heine,” whose owner, as Lacan (1957–58) added in his

own voice, “played the most oppressive role in [Heine’s] life” (p. 54), namely,

the role of the master signifier.

The Three Times of the Oedipus Complex

Lacan’s whole seminar is devoted to explaining the process of the “formations

of the unconscious” by employing this mechanism of witticism, in which a

metonymical combination of the signifiers leads to a metaphorical substitution.

There is, however, a missing piece of the puzzle: how exactly does this transition

becomes effected with regard to the psychic development of the child? Here is

where Lacan introduced the “three times of the Oedipus complex”: frustration,

privation, and castration. We have already explained what frustration is but

only at an empirical level. The mother’s talking on the phone, chatting with the

father, reading a book, and so on are examples of the mother’s pursuing the

phallus, not the symbolic one (F), but the imaginary one (j). The imaginary

triangle of the Oedipus complex is thus formed, not really as the child-mother-

father triangle, but as the child-mother-j triangle.

Hence Lacan presented us with a variation of the Lacanian schema “L”

(see Figure 2), in which we see two triangles: the imaginary triangle in

perforated line E (Enfant)-M (Mere)-j and the symbolic triangle in real line E-

M-P (Pere). The first triangle of E-M-j exhibits the structure of the first time of

the Oedipus complex – frustration – in which the child pursues the desire of the

mother, who herself runs after the ever-escaping imaginary phallus. At this

stage, the child tries to master the mother’s desire by becoming the imaginary

phallus that she seeks. Since he tries to be the phallus, he competes with



everything that appears to him to be the object of the mother’s desire. The

aggressivity that the child shows in the imaginary stage originates from this

game of rivalry, whose motto Lacan formulated by modifying Hamlet’s famous

line, “To be or not to be the phallus: that is the question!”

The second time of the Oedipus complex – privation – begins when the child

is threatened by the “fact” of castration. Lacan, however, repeatedly pointed

out that it is not the child, but the mother, who becomes castrated at this

juncture. In fact, the parent’s words that threaten the child with castration

(“If you keep on playing with it, I will have it cut off you!”) do not lead to any

real effect. A real effect is brought about only when the child witnesses the

“privation” of the phallus manifested in the body of the mOther. Likening this

moment to that of confronting the horrifying “head of Medusa,” the symbol of

the mother’s sexual organ, Lacan (1957–58) argued:

The phallus is found always covered by the bar put upon its access to the

signifying domain, namely upon its place in the Other. And it is by this that

castration is introduced in development. This is never y by way of an

interdiction on masturbation, for example. [I]t is a matter of the being in the

world who, on the plane of the real, would be presumed to have the least

chance of being castrated, namely the mother. It is at this place that

castration is manifested in the Other and the desire of the Other is marked

by the signifying bar [la barre signifiante], and it is here, and essentially by

this route that – for both the man and the woman – the specific thing that

functions as the castration complex is introduced.

Hence, the child’s discovery of the lack of the phallus in the mOther marks the

moment when the Other is finally barred. This is indeed the same barred A [Autre]

that we can find at the upper left corner of the complete graph of desire. Lacan

held, however, that the mOther thus castrated does not appear weakened to the

child in any sense. On the contrary, she becomes much stronger precisely because

Figure 2: Two Triangles.Source: Lacan, 1957–58, p. 183, reproduced by permission.

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she is castrated; she is now, without the phallus, turned into a black hole, the

mouth that can devour the entire existence of the child (p. 350). It is at this

moment that the child seeks help from the side of the father, who has the phallus,

not the imaginary one but the symbolic one (F). The child erects the phallus,

borrowed from the father, in the mother’s open mouth to keep it from shutting.

Lacan indicated this phase as the third time of the Oedipus complex –

castration. By forcing the child to relinquish his attempt to be the imaginary

phallus, the father finally separates him from the tyrannical or whimsical law of

the mother, thereby constituting him as the subject in the proper sense of the

term. The question “to be or not to be the phallus” is replaced here by another

question, “to have or not to have the phallus.” Insofar as having something does

not necessarily exclude the possibility of sharing it with others, this new

question avoids the rivalry that we come across in the child’s imaginary game of

presence and absence; thus the child can borrow the symbolic phallus from the

father without necessarily destroying him.

Many Lacanian scholars, including Zizek (1989, p. 122), view the barred A as

marking the moment when the subject finally discovers the lack in the Other or

the inconsistency of the Other and thus becomes able to separate himself from

the symbolic. The subject’s own realization that “the Other does not have it” is

supposed to dissolve the previous image of the almighty Other by giving

him a chance to make a subversion. This interpretation, however, is doubly

misleading. First, by failing to distinguish the two different symbolic Others, the

mother and the father, it renders unintelligible Lacan’s logic of the Oedipus

complex. Second, it confuses the stage of frustration with that of privation. The

inconsistency of the Other is, in fact, what is already manifested at the stage of

frustration. It is precisely because the mOther changes her law inconsistently by

desiring something else that the child continues to try to be the very object that

might fill her void. The privation of the phallus that the subject encounters

within the mOther is nothing of this kind. It, rather, constitutes the moment of

anxiety when things get real, when the subject is no longer able to indulge

himself in the imaginary Fort-Da game with the mother.

From this angle it is interesting to observe that Bruce Fink (1995) expresses

perplexity caused by one of the passages from Lacan’s Seminar X on anxiety. He

quotes from Lacan:

What provokes anxiety? Contrary to what people say, it is neither

the rhythm nor the alternation of the mother’s presence-absence. What

proves this is that the child indulges in repeating presence-absence games:

security of presence is found in the possibility of absence. What is most

anxiety-producing for the child is when the relationship through which he

comes to be – on the basis of lack which makes him desire – is most

perturbed: when there is no possibility of lack, when his mother is

constantly on his back. (quoted in Fink, 1995, p. 53)



After quoting that passage, Fink argues:

This example fails to conform to Lacan’s notion of separation, for the

negatives here (the lacks) both apply to the same term: the mother, in other

words, the Other. The mOther must show some sign of incompleteness,

fallibility, or deficiency for separation to obtain and for the subject to

come to be as $; in other words, the mOther must demonstrate that she is a

desiring (and thus also a lacking and alienated) subject, that she too has

submitted to the splitting/barring action of language, in order for us to

witness the subject’s advent. The mother, in the above example from

Seminar X, monopolizes the field: it is not clear whether she herself has

come to be as a divided subject. (pp. 53–54)

Now we can clearly see that Lacan in that passage was trying to differentiate

frustration and privation: frustration is the stage in which the child indulges

in the game of presence–absence with the mother, whereas in the privation

stage, the child, no longer able to find an escape from the mother, is consumed

by the fantasmatic image of being swallowed by her. What Lacan called “no

possibility of lack” characterizes the situation in which the child is already in the

closing mouth of the mOther. By conflating the two stages and focusing solely

on the logic of frustration, Fink mistakenly argues that Lacan’s account of

“the mother monopolizing the field” does not conform to his own logic of

“separation.”

Lacan’s argument, however, can be properly understood only when it is

combined with another: that the castrated mother grows not weaker but much

stronger. It is because the castrated mOther monopolizes the entire field of

subjectivity that the subject cannot help but call for the father’s help and thus

enter the next stage of the Oedipus complex, castration. After describing the

dilemma in which a female child finds herself as she witnesses her castrated

mother, Lacan (1957–58) argued:

You should not believe that for man the situation is better. It is even

more comic. He, the poor unfortunate, has the phallus [the penis],

and it is in fact knowing that his mother does not have it which

traumatizes him—because, then, as she is much stronger, where are

we going to end up? It is in this primitive fear of women that Karen

Horney showed one of the most essential sources of the disturbances

of the castration complex [to consist]. [I]n the last analysis he will

resolve the question of the danger which threatens what he effectively has,

by what we know well, namely a pure and simple identification with the

one who has its insignia [i.e. the phallus], with the one who to all

appearances has escaped the danger, namely the father. (pp. 350–351;

italics added)

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It can be said, then, that one of the major problems in both Zizek’s and Fink’s

accounts lies in their confusion between frustration and privation, a confusion

that, in turn, is closely related to their problematic interpretation that views

separation as the separation from the symbolic as such. The Lacanian

separation, however, operates unequivocally by discriminating the two symbolic

orders: the metonymical symbolic that arrives in advance (the mother’s desire)

and the metaphorical, pure symbolic (the name-of-the-father). The symbolic

phallus proffered by the father cannot be negated, because without it there is no

possibility of a separation of the subject from the mOther.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Lacan’s entire effort in Seminar V was

directed toward differentiating the symbolic that arrives in advance from

the symbolic proper. Lacan’s criticism of Klein was that she ignored the

dimension of desire, confining her understanding of demand merely to the

level of need. Whether it pertains to biological functions or to innate drives,

need remains something to be satisfied. Desire, on the other hand, cannot

ultimately be satisfied; it designates the abysmal gap between the two desires’

constantly missing each other (the subject’s and the Other’s). Hence, what is

important is to learn how to enjoy the desiring itself, the dissatisfaction itself of

the desire.

The Debate with Marxism

We can now approach another debate contained in Lacan’s Seminar V, namely,

the debate with Marxism. Praising Marx as “a precursor of the mirror stage”

(p. 81), Lacan pointed out that, in his theory of commodity, no quantitative

relations of value could be installed before “an equivalence in general” was

established. In other words, it is not a question of establishing equality among

many measures of the same kind of goods (for instance, apples). It is, rather, a

question of comparing different kinds of goods (apples and oranges). Such a

comparison of goods that are totally heterogeneous qua use values can be

achieved only at the level of the signifier, at which everything becomes a signifier

of the value of everything else. Lacan referred this Marxist idea of general

equivalence of value to the effect of metonymy:

If the indications that I gave you the last time on the metonymical function

aimed at something, it is what, in the simple unfolding of the signifying

chain, is produced from equalization, leveling, and equivalence. It is an

effacement or a reduction of sense, but this is not to say that it is non-

sense. Apropos of this, I took the Marxist reference – to put in function

two objects of need in such a way that one becomes the measure of the

value of the other, to efface from the object what is precisely the order

of need, and, out of this fact, introduce it into the order of value. From the



point of view of sense, this can be called by a sort of neologism which also

presents an ambiguity, the de-sens. Let us call it today simply the

peu-de-sens. Once you have this key, the signification of the metonymical

chain will not fail to appear clear to you. (p. 97)

From Lacan’s point of view, it was not a problem but, rather, worthwhile that

Marx formulated commodity at the level of the signifier, at the level of

metonymy. A problem arose, however, when Marx tried to overcome the

capitalist commodity relationship by assuming the existence of some sort of

“natural metaphor” that could bring back together again the two different

levels of demand, namely, need and desire. In other words, he idealistically

believed that such a “natural metaphor,” once discovered, could put an end to

the peu-de-sens of the metonymical commodity relationship and reproduce, at a

higher level, “the ancient satisfaction,” the “first pleasure of the satisfied

demand” (p. 96) for all individuals. Lacan’s point was that, as long as the peu-

de-sens expressed the irreducible gap between the desire of the subject and that

of the Other (other people in this case), it could not be removed in an absolute

fashion. Something would always be missing, something unsatisfied. In fact, this

missing element (j) is what constitutes the condition of possibility of everyone’s

enjoying the desiring itself.

In this perspective, Marx’s idea of communism is a myth insofar as it alleged

it could close the gap between various individual discrepant desires and thus

satisfy everyone. By creating a “natural metaphor,” which is an oxymoron,

Marx tried simultaneously to catch two rabbits running in opposite directions:

need and desire. Lacan argued that Lenin’s famous dictum fell into a similar

trap: “Socialism is probably a very attractive thing, but the perfect community

has electrification as well” (p. 91). Although he tried to go beyond the order of

need by “creating desire other than need,” Lenin nevertheless ended up

conflating, again, the two levels of need and desire by defining desire as “the

signifier plus need” (socialism plus electrification). Lacan was proposing, then,

to divorce completely the two levels, and conceptualize desire solely at the level

of the signifier.

After explaining the long and winding development of the dialectic of desire,

Lacan revisited the issue of Marxism in session 26 and argued:

We arrive thus at the ideal society. What I describe is something that has

been dreamt of by utopians from time immemorial, namely a perfectly

functioning society, one resulting in the satisfaction of each according to

his needs. I add, to tell the truth, that all participate here according to their

abilities [merites], and it is here that the problem begins. (p. 461)

The two well-known utopian catch phrases, “each according to one’s ability”

and “each according to one’s need,” are taken from Marx’s (1875) Critique of

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the Gotha Programme. The former principle characterizes socialism as the

initial form of the Marxist society, while the latter characterizes communism as

its final form. Lacan (1957–58) criticized Marx’s regression to the level of need,

or, rather, his conflating the level of the signifier (desire) with that of need:

In sum, this schema [of each according to his need], if it remains at the

level of the intersection of the signifier and the pressure or tendency of

need, what does it result in? It results in the identification of the subject

with the Other, insofar as the Other articulates the distribution of

resources that can respond to need. This is unlikely, for the simple reason

that it is necessary to take into account the background of the demand, if

only to explain the articulation of the subject in an order which exists

beyond the order of the real, and which we call the symbolic order, which

complicates the former, which is superimposed upon it, and which does

not adhere to it. (p. 461; italics added)

There we can plainly see where Lacan’s disagreement with Marxism lay. From

Lacan’s standpoint, Marx overlooked not the order of the real, but the order of

the symbolic. Marx, though in a different context, made the same mistake as

Klein did. This is why Lacan in this seminar engaged in a double battlefront,

entwining the two critiques into one thread. The whole construction of the

upper level of the graph of desire aimed to bring into relief and carefully

delineate the symbolic dimension that in principle should not be mixed up with

the imaginary or the real.

Conclusion

In Seminar XI the concept of separation was introduced in opposition to that of

alienation. Yet, not only did Lacan (1973) conclude the seminar by stressing the

importance of the paternal metaphor (p. 276), but also, in his essay, “Position of

the Unconscious,” he clearly designated “the metaphor of the father as principle

of separation [la metaphore du pere comme principe de la separation]” (1966,

p. 720; translation modified).

What does the emphasis on the symbolic imply for the Lacanian critique of

ideology? The first (negative) implication is that it should recognize that Lacan’s

main contribution does not lie in his elaborating a theory of revolutionary

politics. In fact, Lacan showed his skepticism about revolutionary practice on a

number of occasions including the episode in 1968 when he made this notorious

comment, “Revolutionary aspirations have only one possibility: always to end

up in the discourse of the master. Experience has proven this. What you aspire

to as revolutionaries is a master: You will have one!” (quoted in Stavrakakis,

1999, p. 12). In Seminar XI, too, Lacan (1973) assessed the French Revolution



rather critically by claiming that it had failed to overcome the effect of

alienation because it was content with simply inverting the dualistic imaginary

relation between the subject and the master (pp. 213, 219–220). It is an irony

that many post-Lacanian scholars seek in Lacan a theoretical justification for

revolutionary politics.

The second (positive) implication is that the Lacanian critique of ideology

should focus more on the issue of the extreme violence of identity. Analyzing

Nazism in his conclusion to Seminar XI, Lacan (1973) urged us to see in it the

presence of the desire of the Other that he called “the dark God” (p. 275).

Fanaticisms of various kinds emerge when the subject’s passion for the real fails

to find a way to integrate itself into the symbolic order proper, regresses to the

level of the desire of the Other (wherein the symbolic is hopelessly tangled with

the imaginary), and thus turns into a blind aspiration for recognition of the

maternal charismatic figure who promises to satisfy all the needs the subject

has. Against this regressive tendency, Lacan upheld the Kantian idea of moral

law, which successfully isolates “desire in its pure state” by sacrificing – even

murdering – the pathological-imaginary object of love. Is this Kantian transition

to symbolic law the most effective way to counteract the extreme violence of

identity? Is there really no way to make revolutionary politics compatible

with the politics of civility? These are undoubtedly legitimate questions; but to

raise them it seems that one must be able to think not only with Lacan but also

sometimes without him.

About the Author

Won Choi is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He is

working on his dissertation, tentatively titled, “A Structuralist Controversy:

Althusser and Lacan on Ideology.”

Note

1 All quotations from Seminar V are the author’s own translation from the original French.

A published translation is available in English under the title The Seminar of Jacques Lacan V: TheFormations of the Unconscious, translated by Cormac Gallagher (London: Karnac, 2002).

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